now graced by visits from the dept of homeland security, Gandhidham, Darwin Australia,Chattisgarh , Encyclopedia Britannica, the US Department of State,US Department of Defense, USAISC(The US millitary communications war command HQ) the The New York times, New York State Attorney general;s office, Apple (to look at my tech Gadget essentials), US house of representatives, The department of Homeland security and The Canadian ministry of education. and The office of the commissioner for baseball.

Shashanka Ghosh’s Quick gun murugan previewed at the Indian film festival at los angeles(IFFLA) , friday night. Many people were completely confused. many others were angry. The movie is a zen koan couched as an exquisitely detailed badly played out joke on the tamil (and Indian) B movie industry(which makes abut 65% of the 1000 films produced each year in India. It is also simultaneously a tribute to the westerns which have provided the generic body for some of these films (Sholay included) to hang their hats on.

The authenticity of the set design and the labored contextual jokes in the film add up to much more than a send up comedy about archaic tamil film production values. If you wanted to see only that , go see Shah rukh Khan’s testosterony comedy routines in Om Shanti Om.

QG Murugan is more a tragic meditation from a cinematic psyche wounded from watching three hours of a b movie genre blender trainwreck, between cowboys and Indians in tamil films.

Rajinikanth in Thai meethu Sattiam, which could easilyhave been the “murugan” prequel.

It’s difficult to even begin to describe the equisite detailing in the film(it’s like a kancheevaram saree in purple (katrippu kalar)stars and stripe buttas). It is an Authentic south Indian cowboy film. I was commenting after the film that the makers should dub it in tamil and do a full fledged posters and all release in B and C centers in South India(and in the UP, and in Bihar….) they will have a super hit on their hands and Dr Rajendra Prasad, at age fifty something will be busy doing cowboy movies all his life.

Shatrughan Sinha, BJP MP from bihar, now.

Indeed it looks like one of those loudies Shatrughan Sinha might have done when he was in demand. Shashanka ghosh admitted after the screening that he had never actually seen an old south indian film he was mocking, but went by the details his driven screen writer (Rajesh Devraj) who coincidentially , was part creator of the quick gun murugan (vegetarian Cowboy) TM charecter, had given him.

Shashanka Ghosh

Alas, the earnest Shashanka Ghosh seems to have more arts festival-y ambitions for the film. Maybe that’s the film’s downside. It is a serious introspection into “where we went wrong” (ever tried to tell a producer that?) in “genre blending”(aka copying bollywood movies). The spoonful of medicine is missing the sugar.

Sugar

Good grief is that ramba?

Rambha was never really a thin actress. In this film , she looks like jaya malini in her heyday of tamil caberet. (context: Jaya malini must have had the widest hips in the world for a bellydancer-caberet artist…like in evvver, but that didn’t stop her from shaking them…all of them…in every movie in the decade commencing 1972). Rambha also speaks english dialog like she were parrotting the shorthand script written by a internet film school freshman,and the effect is dramatic. we now, quite unintentionally, have a genre blender inclusive of the “bad NRI film ” genre.

What’s up with the language blenders?

Half the film is in tamil film dialog tamil, the other half is in english. The villain of the film (Rice plate reddy..take THAT telegu Association of North America’s Reddy caste wing!) looks half like a “minor” from Andra pradesh(a minor is an aging village playboy landlord steriotype prevelent in south India) and half like the Austin powers villain. everybody speaks english in the second half, as if amchi cembur’s lingua franca changed in the last hundred years. Its freaky to see an old mami wearing the crumpled green madisar speaking to the men of the house in english “wait wait let me get you some masala dosa to eat”…etc

What’s up with all the english anyway? the film might even have been so good that it’s good if it were in tamil through and through. Shashanka ghosh sold out on tamil B movie audiences, and they will remember…mind it.

Quick Gun Lives on….mind it.

Quick Gun Murugan adds up to less than the sum of its parts ,which is a pity because with some cosmetic changes this film could have been a really bad film that was fun to watch. and on the plus side, The Quick gun Murugan (vegetarian cowboy) tm charecter lives on, to go to America.

6 Responses to Quick Gun Murugan(tm) (2009,Ghosh)

For those who enjoy chopsocky movies and Hollywood “action” movies, this film was a marvelous spoof of “Matrix,” “Terminator,” “Seven Samurai,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (with coconut trees in place of bamboos, and those delicious harnessed skywalking slowmotion scenes), Sergio Leone (terrible spaghetti western music) and action borrowed from Kurosawa’s early samurai movies, and James Bond (you say Austin Powers, but Powers spoofed Bond, yaknow). Some hints of early Woody Allen (What’s Up Tiger Lily?) and Chicken and Duck Talk, a HK comedy about competing restaurants, spice up this utterly delightful movie. I give it four severed thumbs up and two LMFAOs.

I suspect it won’t win the level of acclaim that it deserves – one needs to have a fairly extensive experience of movies from many different cultures to appreciate the sly humour of this film.